Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent titles, has launched a campaign aimed at providing a platform for journalists who are facing harassment and intimidation in their own countries.

In an article in today's Independent, he says a new section of the paper's website, called "Voices in Danger", will feature case studies and interviews (where it is safe to do so). It will also reproduce some of their work.

Lebedev explains that it was the murder of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 that "brought home to me the importance of journalistic freedom." She was working for his family's Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, when she was killed.

Three men were charged with her murder and acquitted. But there has been widespread criticism of the investigation. It has been "hopeless", writes Lebedev. It is also known that she was being watched by state security agents at the time. Four other Novaya Gazeta were subsequently killed.

Lebedev writes about the links between the paper's investigative work and the problems being faced by his father, Alexander:

"Only last year, the head of Russia's version of the FBI, Alexander Bastrykin, drove the paper's deputy editor to the middle of a forest outside Moscow and threatened to have him killed after our exposés of corruption in his organisation.

Bastrykin is now spearheading a campaign in the Russian courts against my father Alexander, who has refused demands to muzzle the newspaper. Our family's sources tell us there is a contract out on his head if he is jailed.

So I, and my family, know only too well what risks members of the media take in the course of their work."

Lebedev believes there is a need to know about the pressures from "despotic regimes" on journalists trying to exercise freedom of speech.

The "Voices in Danger" initiative is being launched in collaboration with the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, and other NGOs.